How to Remove Effect of Spam Backlinks Using Google Disavow links Tool

The Google Disavow Links tool is one of the most long-awaited and talked-about features since the Penguin update hit. Before I talk about this addition from the Google webmaster team, let’s do a bit of time-travel.

Since Penguin was created to penalize any site using spam methods to generate backlinks and manipulate search engine rankings, people started to abuse this system by creating spam links for legitimate sites, in an effort to lower their rankings. Some of them succeeded. Many brands were affected by the negative SEO campaign, though others remained unaffected. This all led to the major problem of controlling the backlinks pointing to a site.

Bing understood the problem webmasters faced and launched the Bing Disavow Links tool after the Penguin update. A similar link disavow tool from Google has been highly anticipated, and today Matt Cutts announced the launch of the Google Webmaster Disavow links tool.

What is Google’s Disavow Links tool?

Let me explain this in simple terms: If you understand the concept of negative SEO, you know that negative SEO is the dark side of SEO, especially since Google has made it clear that they will penalize sites involved in any link spam.

Anyone can go to a site like Fiverr and use those bulk link-building services to generate 10,000-20,000 links within one or two-day time period, and can thus negatively affect any site’s search engine ranking. Your site may not necessarily be hurt by such link spam, but a well-planned SEO attack can completely take down a site ranking.

How can a webmaster control this link spam?

In the past there was no direct and easy way to control such link spam apart from emailing the webmaster and asking him to remove the links. However, when such links are created for the purpose of creating spam, in most of the cases you will not be able to reach the webmaster, or your request will not even be considered.

Google Disavow Links tool is an attempt by Google to give power to webmasters to report and submit such links to Google, and if they were hit by negative SEO or any Penguin update, this would help them to quickly get out of it.

Technically, Google spots spam links and spam sites by default, so in most of the cases, such links will not harm your site performance. However, many sites have been affected by spam links, and the number is rising with each Penguin data refresh and update.

“If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress in getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site.”

In short, Google will not value links from any domains which you have reported using Google’s Disavow Links tool.

How to use Google’s Disavow Links feature:

First, this feature is not for everyone to use. If your site is affected by spammy links and the issue is beyond your control, you can use this feature to get rid of the spam links. Particularly for websites that are affected by Penguin updates, you should consider using the Google Disavow Links feature right away.

The hardest part of the process is creating a list of links which you wish to disavow. You can use the Google Webmaster tool to download a list of backlinks pointing to your site. You can also use any 3rd party backlink checker tool, and my favorite is SEMRUSH & Ahrefs which not only monitors old links, but also allows you to see the list of all new links and dead links.

Create a text file and write one link/line which you wish to disavow. If you wish to ignore a complete domain which is sending too many spammy links to your site, you can simply use the domain: example.com in that text file to ignore links coming from the entire domain.

On the next page, click on Disavow links again, and it will open a pop-up. From here you need to browse and upload the spam links text file you created in the previous step.

Click on upload and submit, and that’s it. You have successfully reported all spam links to Google! You will also get a confirmation email once the file is uploaded:

Here is a detailed video by Matt Cutts, in which he talks about Google’s new Disavow Links feature. Prior to using this feature, I highly recommend that you watch this video.

When you want to add new links to your Disavow link text file, Google gives you an option to download and add or remove links from the existing file. To see the effect of the uploaded file, it may take up to 1-2 weeks, as Google will reindex and recrawl those pages. As Matt Cutts mentioned in the video displayed above, this is only the initial phase of this tool, and we can expect a better version of this tool in the near future.

My suggestion is to use this feature only when you know what you are doing – and know how to use it properly. Otherwise, you would do well to let your SEO person do it for you. Getting the wrong links disavowed could lead to a drop in ranking for your site. Also, if you are among those who have received a spam link warning in Webmaster tool, you can now offer a rebirth to those of your dead sites which were penalized by the existence of link spam.

Google should consider adding this tool in a more visual form, as it will not only help them to find more spam sites but will also give rapid access to this tool. Currently the whole process of finding links and creating a text file with links you wish to disavow, is a lot of work. Nonetheless, this feature is something every webmaster has been waiting for — and it’s finally here.

What has been your experience using Google Disavow links?

Have you used any other tools to find the spammy links pointing to your site?

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A blog scientist by the mind and a passionate blogger by heart ❤️. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud (Award winning blog), speaker at various international forums.
Life motto: Live while you can! Teach & inspire while you could & Smile while you have the teeth.

a great tool no doubt though this should have been first released by google and then by bing, lol. i have not been affected by penguin update as such but will remember this method in case i have a lot of spammy links pointing to my site in the future. thanks for the info 🙂

Surely Harsh that’s a great addition. It will be easy for us to report those links that are spammy and being created against our wish. But the hard part will be identifying which links you need to point and which one you actually need to ignore. But any way now we have something you can use as a weapon to fight against spammers.

So the bloggers who are buying spammy links doesnt remove the links, they going to effect their sites SEO and loose rankings when ever there is a new update of Panda/Penguin. this is going to effect the spammy link builders now, a great move by Google.

i m doing seo from last 3 years but no knowledge to promote a blog, now i m planing to start a blog, i need your help regarding keywords, like i saw many blog’s backlinks on delicious and other sites having title the same of the blog post which has no searches on search engines.
plz help me suggesting keywords by given one of your blog’s post example
(like which kind of keywords you are using for the above post).

and second thing is where to promote the blog to get maximum benefit well i guess to promote a blog on forums, social bookmarking and blog directories sites but what do you think.

i like this tool too much…….Google really made SEO more easy………..one of my site is for bookmarking but i am not able to work on it so just shut it down and after penguin lots of users are sending me mail to remove their links this was really hard to work on all of those request so from now its breath of relax for me………….

I had not heard of this tool and it seems to be useful especially for Penguin update hit sites. Still I have many doubts as you said it ay be dangerous to use if we do not require it and may affect our rankings. Is it possible that if I find spammy links which were not so then it may be penal for my site?

Thank you Harsh Agrawal, my site is linked in 3 or 4 too much spammy sites. And they are harmful too. I want to completely remove my site links from there. Please help me to remove those links. Those links does’nt even exist in my site (i.e when users come from there my site gives 404 not found error.) But I want to remove those links.
please give me a .txt file format then i will replace the spamy domain names. and I want to know that in text file I have to put that spammy site link or backlinks urls???
I much worried about it Please help

But still I doubt that Google Disavow links Tool is a solution for removal of spammy links. I had worked with many webmasters but I had hardly heard from them that Google Disavow Tool worked for them.

To this do you have any thing to say.Also I would like to know when Google say, Google is banning all the domains that are involved in Black hat SEO, then why doesn’t google completely remove all these domains from Google index.

Dont you think this step of Google will help a lot to all the webmasters.
I know to some extent my discussion is out of topic, do excuse for that.

Harsh i am regular reader of ur site..i have one problem in last one month.google has blocked my website for spamming blog 2 times in last one month..then i send request ,waiting one day next day i received mail ” mistakenly ur website “..and restore my website.. whats my doubt is “why this happende my site ?” am not spamming anything from site..google locked my site 2 times in last one month..(my site trsffic :daily page 8500)..one day they locked my site means i lost 3000 visitor..what can i do how to prevent this ? PLEASE HELP ME !!

Hi harsh agarwal, I have a small doubdt that im working on a website called datascribelpo where i need to remove baclinks for that website . i have collected the links from webmasters and other tools . we can remove the links which are working so that we can mail the webmaster to deleate our link . but if it in the case a website is not working and its domain is expired but still we have a backlink from that website . so how can we remove this type of links any suggestion please . we can go to disvow or any other methods to link removal of those websites

Harsh!
I have submitted the list of domains that i don’t like to have my website links. I got this list from webmaster tools, links to my site.
As you mentioned that it will work after 1 to 2 weeks. Will it remove the bad links from webmaster tools, links to my site list?
Best regards,

hi Harsh. I always like to read your article. Every time when i face any problem, looking for this solution on google like this
“How to remove low quality back links shout me loud ” . Your articles have never disappointing me.
Thank you a Thank you so much.
Finally I have find the solution with your helpful article

I had one site with very old bad spammy links and just did a hard research on finding those bad quality links to remove them. In my opinion suggesting a free tool to do that the easy way will be great.

Great post, Harsh your efforts are high. I am searching for the internet to ‘How to remove unnecessary backlinks’ now I landed on your page, I am getting too many spammy links on my blog, I am little bit worried with those links, then I started listing them, but before reading this article I don’t know how to remove those spammy links, finally I got my solution from your blog, it’s time to use ‘Disavow tool’. Thank’s Harsh, again I want to appericiate your efforts.

Thanks for solving my confusion. I still have a question that I can send a request for the remove backlink without attaching text file as you suggest. I mean is there any option available in webmaster for the direct send single link removal link?

Thanks Harsh for your perfect guideline. Google Disavow links tool is an excellent tool that helps us to remove toxic links. If we want to get better rank on google we must be free from bad backlinks. Disavow tool will help us to delete all the toxic links.

Hey Harsh, I used Cognitive SEO tool to find unnatural links and submitted successfully in webmaster to disavow these links. But how much time will it take to disavow these links? Will webmaster notify me? Thanks in Advance, Waiting for your reply.

Hi there Harsh. Recently one of my blog’s traffic decreased by 80%. I haven’t got any Penalty Main in Webmaster Tools. After that with the Help of Google Disavow Tool, I found Bad Links and Submit it to Google to Disavow them But the Problem is I haven’t seen any Change even after 1 week of the Action. According to You How Much time, It will take to get My traffic Back after Disavowing the Link?